Friday, July 17, 2009
A great deal has been written recently about MBAs, much of it negative. To some, MBA graduates are seen as the arrogant, process driven terminators of the modern business age, sent like swarms of locusts by the big consulting firms to tell you how to run your business. These are people driven by a religious fervour for proven processes, rigid methodologies like SixSigma and data driven decision making. Not for them intangible concepts like intuition, experience and empathy.
None of this is necessarily bad of course, but it might explain why MBA schools are generally so poor at advertising.
Turn to the The Economist and you’ll see what I mean. Adverts for MBA courses showcase what the best of the best come up with when they have to employ skills like creativity, empathy and understanding. The results aren’t very impressive.
I would love to see the personal accident figures for the average MBA school. How do all those earnest, clean shaven MBA students, shown in the adverts looking at distant horizons, navigate the treacherous steps of their buildings?
When they are not shown looking into the distance or towards an out-of-shot computer screen most of them appear to spend their days rock climbing. Judging from the adverts, I imagine that ‘rising to the challenge’ and ‘climbing to the top’ are probably significant learning modules in the majority of courses.
Not only must most MBA courses be intellectually challenging, they must be very dangerous too.
Climbing, leaping and overcoming imaginary obstacles may be the hoariest of business clichés but it hasn’t stopped the MBA schools from using them with relish. Maybe mountains researched well?
We could dismiss this as merely examples of bad advertising and design, but I find it worrying that the business leaders of tomorrow and their teachers appear incapable of connecting with their audiences in a more imaginative way. They have cast aside those central tenets of communication – intelligence, differentiation, and building positive reputation – in favour of tedious, me too, lowest common denominator consensus.
And this bodes as badly for the future of design and communications as it does for the future of the economy.
If they are not already doing so, MBA graduates will probably soon be running the biggest businesses on the planet, possibly by taking no risks, sticking to established best practice and following the pack. Contrary to popular opinion it was not only risk taking that got the world economy into its current mess. It was greed, a herd mentality and a reliance on data over experience.
But I did find a glimmer of hope in the darkness – Bocconi School of Management in Milan. I hadn’t heard of them before, but they use wit and illustration in their communications which makes them stand out from the competition in a way that makes me think they might just be a very clever bunch of people. If I was choosing an MBA course, I’d seriously consider them.
Simon Case
simon.case@greentarget.net